Manohla Dargis

There’s more flab than muscle packed on this galumphing franchise reboot, which, as it lumbers from scene to scene, reminds you of what a great action god Steven Spielberg is. Too bad he didn’t take the reins on this.

There is very little fun in The Ice Harvest, which wouldn't pose a problem if the film had some fleshed-out ideas to go along with the booze, the booty and the recycled plot points.

It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie.

But since Costner canít save his movie, it's something of a stretch to think he might be able to save the world.

At once illogical and insultingly stupid, filled with dead-end twists and the sort of dialogue that makes a mockery of actual adult relations.

The amateurish production values might be pardonable if the clichés -- the hard-core porn star with the soft heart, the therapist who needs to heal herself -- inside the poorly lighted, badly shot images weren’t so absurd and often insulting.

The television commercials for the movie say something about this being the same team that brought you “Face/Off,” which is about as relevant to this picture as noting that Paul Thomas Anderson got Wahlberg to drop his pants in “Boogie Nights.”

A.C.O.D., an unfunny comedy about a guy mooning over his parents’ divorce decades later, is so eager to please it’s hard to hate. But it’s sluggish even at 87 minutes, clichéd and gives you nothing of interest to look at other than some familiar faces.

Zombies, Arnold Schwarzenegger and a certain Terrence Malick je ne sais quoi — what could go wrong? More or less everything in this low-budget head-scratcher and periodic knee-slapper.

Doesn’t seem as if it would translate easily to the big screen. It hasn't.

The result is that what was once insignificant is now insufferable.

The only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.

A cringing romance that Mr. Vinterberg tries and fails to spin into a political allegory.

A tediously didactic, often condescendingly reductive 10-part lesson on cinema.

Like too many big-studio productions, Cloverfield works as a showcase for impressively realistic-looking special effects, a realism that fails to extend to the scurrying humans whose fates are meant to invoke pity and fear but instead inspire yawns and contempt. Rarely have I rooted for a monster with such enthusiasm.

Marc Forster takes a maximalist approach to this mumbo jumbo, which means that in addition to lots of wacky angles, shiny surfaces, seemingly endless stairs, and sets of twins, triplets and quadruplets, he deploys the unsettling vision of three talented actors - Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts and Ryan Gosling - straining credulity and neck tendons in the service of serious claptrap.

Banks wants to fight a righteous fight. But she is selling stale goods in which adult women spout girl-power clichés and conform to norms that make it very clear what kind of heroines still get to fly high: young, thin, beautiful, perfectly coifed, impeccably manicured and profoundly unthreatening.

An exploitation flick, but without the thrills or cleavage.

Something certainly blows here, but it isn't the archangel's horn.

As witless as it is formulaic.

A consistently underused and often underrated actor, Kinnear gives one of those sympathetic performances that prevent you from believing the worst about a movie despite the sounding alarms.

My hand trembles slightly as I type these words, but the truth is that while watching 2 Fast 2 Furious, the follow-up to the pleasurably cheap-thrills sleeper "The Fast and the Furious," I realized just how much I miss Vin Diesel.

A family circus of dysfunction that's so familiar you may feel tempted to place bets on how everything will shake out.

Dragon Blade is the kind of nutsy maximalist entertainment that isn’t content merely to tap a handful of influences. Instead, it stuffs an entire encyclopedia of dicey ideas (visual, narrative, political) into a blender to create a wacky, eyeball-popping and -glazing extravaganza.

Delectably vulgar for 20 minutes or so, almost too bad to be true, but because it lacks the demented conviction of real camp, the glint of madness that keeps a bauble like "Valley of the Dolls" afloat, it soon loses its cheap-thrills appeal.

Slight and goofy, this cut-rate attempt to mine "Harry Potterville" is undermined by its ostensible draw: the lead casting of Jonathan Lipnicki.

This banal horror retread involves a couple of critters flailing inside a sticky trap for what is, in effect, the big-screen equivalent of a roach motel.

Kidman, who speaks Russian for much of the movie, turns in a technically impeccable performance, but the movie gets far more out of her than she out of it.

A dud.

Vedette joins a recent roster of documentaries about the uses and abuses of farm animals (others include “Cow” and “Gunda”). It’s disappointing that Bories and Chagnard fail to add anything to this environmentally urgent topic beyond their own surprise that these animals are more than indistinguishable milk factories.

Embedded between all the sex and sunlight are some woefully underdeveloped ideas about American militarism and masculinity. Dumont doesn't bother to develop these ideas, principally because he seems to think it's enough to arrange his characters like puppets and tear off their heads.

Apparently, because all the good jokes were used up in the first two "Fockers" movies, the wisenheimers behind the latest installment in this unnecessary trilogy decided to bring in some spew, opening a sick toddler's mouth like a fire hydrant and letting it rip.

An uncharacteristic if unsurprising dud.

Oblivion never transcends its inspirations to become anything other than a thin copy.

Despite Mr. Nakata's track record and the radiant presence of its star, Naomi Watts, The Ring Two is a dud.

One of the good things about bad movies is that when someone sneers about the unworthiness of a perfectly mediocre film like, say, "Crash," you can turn to a seriously unworthy film like, say, The Santa Clause 3: The Escape Clause and laugh. Ho. Ho. Ho.

The movie lurches from the improbably silly to the drearily so, while the characters remain so emotionally and psychologically divorced from life that they might as well be zombies or sitcom stick figures.

An overlong, undercooked comedy of manners about how, yes, indeed the rich are different.

Riddled with holes and undeveloped characters, and marred by lurching rhythms that may reflect some triage editing, so it's hard to see what Mr. Hafstrom brings to this film other than a murky palette.

As a film, it essentially bites.

In the end, it taketh — your time, patience and faith in newly imagined dystopias — more than it giveth.

A most unfortunate film that combines standard documentary techniques, including talking-head interviews, with some maladroit dramatizations from Aury's life and her novel.

The movie is apparently the most popular British comedy in history. I guarantee that its success has nothing to do with the quality of the actual movie.

Much like the dress that Mr. Pierre designed for her — a white number whose bold black zigzag obscures all of its seams — Mrs. Trump seems exceptionally good at keeping hidden how everything, her marriage and family included, fits together.

Scott's energy helps keep the movie going during its sluggish moments and animates its few bright spots, including a pleasurably dumb showdown on the dance floor of a gay bar.

For the most part it is an uninteresting slog alleviated only by the occasional unintended laugh and moments of visual beauty. Mr. Shyamalan generally torpedoes his movies with overweening self-seriousness.

About the only thing holding it together is Idris Elba, whose irrepressible magnetism and man-of-stone solidity anchors this mess but can’t redeem it.

Joker: Folie à Deux is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom.

Cast adrift with vague, improbable characters and a plot that's at once under-and overcooked, the actors struggle to find a steady tone, lurching from somber to silly as the director tries to figure out what he's doing.

Far more troubling than the documentary's lack of data and analysis, its refusal to pose even basic questions -- whether, for instance, the so-called war on drugs is a total farce -- is the sense that these seven lost souls are principally on display for our viewing displeasure.

The film means to be a darkly funny look at the perils of winning at all costs, but there's nothing dark and searching about its take.

The mood is hermetic to the point of claustrophobia, embellished with a sense of everyday surrealism indebted to David Lynch.

Unlike Tracy and Hepburn, the loving and loathing here are absent music and wit and tend to imply that what Moore's character really needs is a good frolic.

Long on atmosphere and short on believability.

A grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology.

It’s a bummer to see Ms. Page and especially Ms. Moore — who at this point in her career can usually act her way out of any cliché — so badly stranded by a generic script, credited to Ron Nyswaner, and by a director, Peter Sollett, who can’t figure out how to lift his actors and the material above the bad writing.

Although it's often laugh-out-loud laughably bad, 88 Minutes is mostly just a slog.

At least give Sony credit for recycling. That is the best that can be said for its nitwit treasure-hunt movie Uncharted, an amalgam of clichés that were already past their sell-by date when Nicolas Cage plundered the box office in Disney’s “National Treasure” series.

You don’t wait long to be disappointed.

Bruckheimer's latest is in some crucial respects worse than those earlier blockbuster bids ("Gone in 60 Seconds" and "Coyote Ugly") -- certainly it's more fraudulent -- because unlike those films, which don't claim to be about anything other than thrills and tits, Remember the Titans means to be about race.

If only the whole thing were as funny as an Albert Brooks movie.

Madonna may be better in this film than she's been in some of her recent endeavors, especially when she stops screeching her lines, but she's done herself no favors with her choice of material.

The appealing Mr. Baker never manages to find the right tone for the material, partly because he’s been seriously miscast (he radiates too much decency and intelligence for the role), though more because Mr. Waters never establishes a coherent tone for either the character or his situation.

Maybe it's the sight of Leguizamo running around dressed only in boots and a well-placed sock that does her in, or maybe it's just that she's seen this movie too many times before. She isn't the only one.

The real-life sisters Hilary and Haylie Duff star in this incompetent spin on the poor-little-rich-girl story.

Doesn't have the courage of its conceit, only an abundance of bad ideas and worse taste.

The risible dialogue, the bulging eyeballs, the heaving bosoms, the digitally rendered hyenas and squirming maggots, the movie fails to achieve the status of the instant camp classic. That's partly because the vibe of the film is too torpid.

If nothing else, it’s amusing to imagine what [Mr. Bridges] and Ms. Moore chatted about between takes and how each managed to keep from cracking up, more or less.

Twisted is rubbish, but it looks good enough, moves fast enough and does improve as it progresses, principally because its plot disintegrtes to the point of outright comedy.

The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative.

The Benchwarmers is the sort of trash that Hollywood does really well. It is also, to quote Mr. Schneider, "a master's thesis on the form of a quintessential Adam Sandler comedy."

Neither ambitious enough to take seriously nor sleazy enough to enjoy, The Quiet flirts with the trappings of exploitation cinema without going all the way.

The actors don’t just look uncomfortable in their period duds, they also look uneasy in their own skins, which is a feat for two such natural, physically confident screen performers.

The jokes don't just fizzle into insignificance; they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout.

This is the costliest, most logistically complex feature of the filmmaker's career, and it appears that the effort to wrangle so many beasts, from elephants to movie stars and money men, along with the headaches that come with sweeping period films, got the better of him.

The film portrays a family undone by grief over the death of a loved one; that, in any event, is its plot synopsis. More accurately, the film is a wallow of authorial narcissism, and a tedious, unrelenting, uninteresting wallow at that.

They drink at the pub, they drink at home. They drink until they pass out and then, after they have had a good vomit, they drink again. If that sounds too disgusting to watch, it almost is.

With so little trust and even less dialogue to back him up, it's no wonder Li rarely takes his left hand out of his pants pocket. His fists aren't furious; they're on strike.

There may once have been a real movie rattling inside the empty studio package known as The Big Bounce, but no longer.

There is little to recommend here, even for Huppert completists who follow her anywhere.

About the only good thing to say about this mess is that it's rotten enough that even Altman cultists may be forced to reconsider their devotion.

Hitman exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah -- action movies for bored dummies.

By literalizing the idea of American military aggression and all that it implies Ms. Nair doesn’t just invest Mr. Hamid’s story with Hollywood-style beats, she also completely drains it of ambiguity.

The movie’s truth is presumably meant to rest in its emotions, in the spilled tears of its characters, but the only things at stake here are the cozy sniffles of the art-film patron.

The combustible Mr. Ironside vaulted into movie immortality as the antagonist in “Scanners,” David Cronenberg’s down-and-dirty, exploding-head anti-classic. Synchronicity, a low-budget misfire about time and love, could use some exploding heads, dialogue and ideas.

There’s no denying the real Heyerdahl’s bravery, but if this movie is to be believed, his voyage was largely bereft of tension and interesting conversation.

A film worthy neither of Mr. Keaton's talents nor even a desperate horror fan's attention.

The lackluster, at times abysmal writing wouldn’t much matter if Resurgence popped visually or featured a charismatic star who could lift a movie as effortlessly as Will Smith did in the first feature.

A would-be erotic thriller with no heat and zero chills, Deception has the kind of glassy, glossy sheen and risible story that mean to suggest "Basic Instinct" but instead invoke lesser laughers like "Jade" and "Sliver."

An accidental entertainment, Equilibrium is a science-fiction pastiche so lacking in originality that if you stripped away its inspirations there would be precious little left.

Increasingly, reviewing the latest Woody Allen movie has taken on the feel of a dreaded ritual, an annual excursion into careless filmmaking, desperate shtick, and vainglorious misanthropy disguised as cuddly neurosis.

Dopey, derivative and dull, The Host is a brazen combination of unoriginal science-fiction themes, young-adult pandering and bottom-line calculation. That sounds like it should work (really!), but it never does, largely because the story is as drained of energy as are its moony aliens.

Of course, it's terrible -- but did it have to be this bad?

Kept in check by his character's neuroses, Pearce holds our attention throughout, but it isn't until near the end that he manages to break free of his character's and his director's inhibitions.

Mr. McDonagh’s palette and spleen remain mostly intact, but here he’s neglected to include a story or point.

Played by DMX in a gravel-pit monotone and a near-total lack of affect, King David cuts an unremittingly tedious swath through Never Die Alone.

Billy Bob Thornton's leer is much in evidence in the shoddy comedy School for Scoundrels, though the tackiness of the film, its lazy direction and its self-satisfied stupidity may mean that Mr. Thornton curled his lip about the production rather than for it.

A pileup of clichés in service to technological whiz-bangery, “Alita” is one more story of the not quite human brought to life with hubris and bleeding-edge science.